It’s an open secret that Samsung is working to overhaul the TouchWiz UI that comes with it’s Galaxy devices. Starting with the CES tablet announcement, the Pro range, Samsung is said to be working to bring the Magazine UI to the 2014 flagships and others. Ofcourse some of these changes get effected in the Galaxy S Series device of the year, this happens to be the Galaxy S5 which is rumoured to be coming sometime next month.
Now Android 4.4 KitKat update is already rolling to the Galaxy Note 3 but this doesn’t yet have anything new UI-wise, so I’d expect if the new UI comes though it will be something like Android 4.4.2 just to be the “newest” iteration of Android.
Now the meaty part is that even the 2012 flagship devices, the Galaxy Note II and Galaxy S 3 will not only get Android 4.4 KitKat, but will also be getting the new Magazine UI sometime later. The two are said to be getting Android 4.4 KitKat within this quarter and this naturally means they won’t be far from new UI. As expected, Galaxy S5 will be the device to come running with this shiny new UI, then the rest sometime in the middle of the year when the Galaxy S5 has already rolled out.
Comments regarding the new UI range from “It looks like Google Now” to “this has so much Windows Phone influence in it”. Of course the latter came from the widgetized UI on the recently announced Galaxy Pro tablets at CES earlier in the month. The former come after the most recent screenshots of the UI were leaked on twitter. There is so much to think about the UI, and much of how it will be received will have to be based on user experience, though looks come to play too.